Eyes Wide Shut

Among Kubrick’s most transcendent and polarizing achievements was his last film, freely adapted from Arthur Schnitzler’s Dream Story, an epic and paranoiac dive into a shadowy underworld where desire and power reign. New York doctor Bill (Tom Cruise) is having marital problems with his art curator wife Alice (Nicole Kidman), born mostly of his jealous imagination. After she admits that she once nearly cheated on him, he sets off into the night, plunging ever deeper into a hallucinatory, nocturnal realm controlled by a menacing and secretive cabal. Kubrick’s graceful use of Steadicam accentuates Bill’s phantasmagorical journey from an eminently seedy version of Greenwich Village to a country mansion where he comes face to face with the masked elites who control his fate.